It also shows traffic from Google and Facebook to a bunch of publishers – Define's 87 clients. Define says it pulled the data directly from Google Analytics and Omniture.

Check it out:

Define Media Group

Define also published this chart, breaking down where its clients get their traffic from:

Define Media Group

Looking at those two charts, it's not so clear that Facebook became more important than Google in 2013 the way Buzzfeed, Re/code, and The Atlantic proclaimed.

Now … obviously, Define Media Group has a bias.The only reason it published these charts is to remind media companies that they need to worry about optimizing their content for search engines — and that they should hire a firm like Define to do the worrying.

But Buzzfeed also has a bias. Its pitch to advertisers is that social media is a massive trend they need to be a part of, and that buying Buzzfeed-sponsored content is a smart way to play the trend.

In the end, it's pretty easy to reconcile the disparities in the charts. Clients of an SEO firm would get a lot of traffic from search. Partners of a social media powerhouse like Buzzfeed would do really well on Facebook.

The point is: While Facebook traffic to media sites is certainly on the rise, you can't dismiss the power of Google traffic quite yet.